Slashdot Mirror
Men vs. Machines
FFriedel writes "In October classical chess world champion Vladimir Kramnik is scheduled to play Deep Fritz in Bahrain. Now Garry Kasparov, who lost his title to Kramnik in 2000, but is still ranked as the strongest player in the world, has announced that he will play the computer chess world champion Deep Junior in Jerusalem at almost exactly the same time. Both programs are distributed by ChessBase. In 1997 Kasparov lost his famous match against Deep Blue."
When they will test out computers against man in other games that Man wins at currently? I remember Wired had an article about games that Man can beat computers at. I am sure that a computer could whoop some ass at Scrabble against a human, but what about backgammon?
From what I understand, they can't make a program that can beat even a decent player at that game. GNU Go whips me consistently at the lowest lever, though.
BlackGriffen
It's an exciting time for the chess nuts out there. Anyone that follows chess should be fairly excited by this. Of course, the chess followers are rooting for the human, while the AI folks are rooting for the computer.
It's been noted for years that one benchmark of a machine's ability to think intelligently was to beat a grandmaster in chess. That goal has been significantly harder to achieve than beating the Turing test. Now just for a Go playing computer, a harder still benchmark.
"Kasparov would move Qe4 here, man."
"Whoa, deep blue, man."
"Hey guys, we need a name...for...hey!"
And thus it's perpetuated.
this seems pointless
The problem is that these machines are being programmed to play against 1 opponent, and are being fed data about that player's past games, habits, techniques...
Deep Blue won because it was programmed to defeat Kasparov, and only Kasparov.
Until a computer is programmed to accept a blind challenge without background information about their opponent, I will continue to be unimpressed.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
I wonder if that other boy was just refreshing all night.... We assume that the slash-dot effect is not from sheer mass of users but from the fact that they habitually find themselves refreshing pages, as if they can get first post anywhere.
But to stay on topic, I think the most amazing thing about this is that given point value systems, which do exist in chess, or the simple idea of "how to win" the more advanced technology gets the better they are going to become. It won't be long till computers can be programmed and run efficiently code that allows them to add up all possible endings for a single game of chess since the first moves and then calculate which would be the best move to make based upon how many endings turn out in favor of the computer. Where did that Fischer boy go to?
...
How long before some Hamas logic-bomb virus detonates itself in the computer????
Here's what happens when you give a concert at MIT and need something to talk about.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Human brain doesn't develop, or maybe it does it very slowly. Machine speed doubles every so often. You've got a flat line and an exponential. Sooner or later they will intersect, and after that it's all hopeles... Is it news?
But I do remember quite a few people criticizing the Deep Blue stunt because IBM trained Deep Blue by examining every Kasparov match on record. Kasparov had no idea what to expect since Deep Blue never played anyone else. Did Deep Blue every play any other grandmasters?
all i can say is "GO BANANA!"
(simpson's reference)
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
In a related note, tomorrow I'll be playing Deep Poo for the Man-Canine World Championship.
Although I am unranked, I'm not overly nervous as my dog Poo licks her butt. Unfortunately, our last match ended in a draw when Poo decided that my queen looked mighty tasty. Luckily, I was able to recover said queen from Poo's poo in the neighbor's yard. I hosed it down pretty well and we should be able to begin anew tomorrow.
I think Slashdot has had stories about the upcoming Kramnik-Fritz match for over a year now, and there have been at least four of them. Is this match ever going to actually happen, or what?
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
I know some people who believe that being able to play the perfect game of Chess will fundamentally change the world because they will be able to relate the strategy used in Chess to the real world. Unfortunetly this only would work should the rules of the game stay constant, in the real world rules will change and an adapative algorithm will be needed to properly evaluate a given situation.
Why not put the best 2 chess playing machines against one another... will they both short circuit like the 'WHOPPER' in wargames?
Jon Bardin
While Deep Blue was programmed to beat Kasparov Fritz and Deep Junior were not programmed specifically for these matches. Minor things like their opening books may be altered, but the programs will be the same ones released to the general public.
...that they have a separate blue program for each human player. It is well known that the AI is programmed to beat the specific chess player it is going against. Old news. What will be interesting is if they come up with a chess AI to take on and beat any grandmaster. What if sports were played like this for example? "If I pit team A against team B, I know A will win. If I pit team C against D, I know C will win etc. Thus I win the superbowl/world series/whatever using 10 different teams dependant on the situation." Sounds goofy. What will be interesting is when they have a one size fits all deep program that does more than the current slew of programs that only target individuals.
Beware blue cats moving at
Humans and computers don't play chess the same way. The grandmasters can forsee, what is it like 10 of every move into the game, while the computer can see every move forseeable. I've never been a big fan of playing computers in chess, and that goes way back to the old battle chess game.... remember that one, where your characters would duke it out when a player made a capture? Anyways, I was able to beat that one a couple times, but mostly it totally wooped my ass for the simple fact I was 10, didn't have much *game* and lacked the mental capacity to see 100 moves into the game. IMO, the computer should be limited to a set amount of moves and time, and should have to consider which moves it should concentrate on, instead of looking at every single move possible. I'd also like some randomization in the game.
Well, here's a heads up. That is exactly how human players prepare for matches against each other. They sit down and play through their opponents previous matches, and try to find weaknesses and holes to use against them.
The point of all this is equally questioned. People seem to think that creating large expert systems is a done deal, and no more research needs to be done into how to construct programs that use a set of variables to give advice, in this case which chess piece to move. Again, here's a clue:
This kind of stuff is fundamental, basic research. Absolutely vital and incredibly useful as we continue to learn about how to better realise and utilise computer technology.
Insert old saw about dogs walking here.
Who knows who the world champion is in chess? There is all that politcal garbage out there with FIDE and rankings. Bah!
And as far a computer beating a human? Its just not that interesting a problem anymore. Especially when Ken Thompson (of UNIX fame) showed 20 years ago that brute force searches was the way to create a winning system against a human. Not very sporting. A great book on this was "Chess Skill in Man and Machine" edited by Peter Frey.
Its fun to watch humans race each other. Its boring to watch a human race a car. I think the same holds with humans, computers and chess competition.
I have not paid any attention to this, but does someone know whether it would be feasible to base a massively distributed chess engine on the Deep Junior basis? When we were thinking about continuation to the RC5-56 chall this was one thing which we considered. Could it be the time now, or is there already a lot of such projects - or maybe there is even already a category for such monsters :)
He is still going to make a ton of money!!!
Block Quote
"The six games will be played at the classical time control and the prize fund is that roundest of big round numbers, one million dollars. (Kasparov gets half a million up front and the other half is split 60/40 winner/loser. Ka-ching! Garry is definitely paying for dinner next time.)"
End Quote.
So Garry is getting at least 700,000 just for showing up. Man I wish I were that guy.
I have a feeling we'll all be screaming that more and more as things progress.
.
IBM is gonna look pretty good if both humans cream these beasts due to memories of Beep Blue.
Table-ized A.I.
If that fails, he plans to challenge his opponent to a "Double or Nothing" drinking contest at a local bar.
"This kind of stuff is fundamental, basic research."
What a crock. This accomplishment is equivalent to saying the computer can count faster than a human and nothing more.
<WOPR computerized voice> Greetings, Kasparov.
Would.. you.. like... to play... a game? </WOPR computerized voice>
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
this was puglished yesterday in haaretzdaily.com. It has some interesting details like, for example, the track record of Junior, to this date, and that the competition will have a peace-builing slant to it, too.
Sigged!
From an AI standpoint, chess is actually fairly easy - the AI looks ahead as many moves as possible, "thinking" about every single possible move in the time it has. This makes chess playing a very good measure of overall system performance, since the faster the system is, the more moves it can figure in the time it has available. There are some optimisations that can be done to weed out obviously bad moves, but on a whole it's fairly brute-force computing.
Maybe if you were, say, a programmer or a computer professional, or maybe even had read an IT industry magazine at some point you would understand a little about the fundamentals of this discussion.
This has nothing to do with "computers counting faster" and everything to do with expert systems, that is programming computers to make "clever" decisions based on states. If this was just brute-force then why do you think it costs so much money to put together one of these systems? Because they have teams of programmers and serious hardware. More hardware than is needed for a brute-force approach, actually, so what's all the extra hardware doing? If you think this is all as easy as that one class you took in highschool where you typed:
10 PRINT "Hello!"
20 GOTO 10
and then laughed in that odd, shrieking way you have, then you really should get hit with the clue stick.
I'm a chess fan, but I dont see any point in the computer vs. human matches. these "AI" chess playing computers simply look at threes and a database of good/common moves. real AI doesnt use trees (too many possibilities)
IBM even trained deep blue for kasparov, but kasparov never got a chance to play deep blue so could not have any idea of weaknesses in it's game (eg positions not in its database where it would have to waste time looking at the move tree.) which forced him to play very nonstandard games and use styles he is not used to using
to me, the fact that deep blue took kasparov does not mean anything except that kasparov is a truly amazing player (who else can compete against a super-comptuer programmed by computer scientists at a top corporation created soley to beat them?)
even more amazing is that kasparov only lost the series on a game where he was completely off
Only if the human really doesn't talk about anything in particular, and expects a meaningful response. ALICE cannot give meaningful responces.
ALICE would probably make a good CEO, rather than a conversation tool.
CEOBot: What would you like to know?
Interviewer: What were your profits this year?
CEOBot: What would you like to know about our profits this year?
Interviewer: How much were they?
CEOBot: How much do you think they were?
Interviewer: Well, you claimed 22billion.
CEOBot: I'm afraid I really don't know anything about that. Would you like me to sing you a song?
-Jayde
What's a sig?
That hasn't turned out to be the case. The search algorithms that the chess-playing programs use don't appear to be any great use for anything except playing chess (or closely related games like go or checkers).
Personally, I want to see a computer kick Kasparov's and Kramnik's ass (though I'm unconvinced it's going to happen this time around, it certainly will eventually) so that chess players shut up about defending the honor of humanity or some such rubbish. Knowing a little about how chess-playing programs work, I feel about as threatened by the prospect that the world chess champion can be trounced by a computer than the fact that in one second the PC I'm typing this at can do more arithmetic operations than I'll do in a lifetime.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Slightly OT, but...
:)
I'm more interested in seeing someone write a strong Go opponent. It's pretty obvious that chess is rather simple for a powerful computer to brute force, but even the most sophisticated hardware and software can be beaten by an amateur Go player. The strongest Go programs rate at around the 8-kyu level (Go ratings start at 30-kyu for complete beginners, on up to 1-kyu, then from 1-dan to 9-dan for pro players).
There have been cash awards (on the order of a million dollars in at least one instance) put out on the table for developers who could write a Go program capable of beating a certain level player. So far, nobody's succeeded. MindZine has a nice (albeit a bit dated) article explaining why this is.
When a computer can play a really strong game of Go, I'll be impressed.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
Who would win a Turing Test?
Here is an interesting NY Times article that ChessBase linked to.
(For those who say "fuck that registration shit")
***************
Early in the film "A Beautiful Mind," the mathematician John Nash is seen sitting in a Princeton courtyard, hunched over a playing board covered with small black and white pieces that look like pebbles. He was playing Go, an ancient Asian game. Frustration at losing that game inspired the real Mr. Nash to pursue the mathematics of game theory, research for which he eventually won a Nobel Prize.
In recent years, computer experts, particularly those specializing in artificial intelligence, have felt the same fascination -- and frustration.
Programming other board games has been a relative snap. Even chess has succumbed to the power of the processor. Five years ago, a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue not only beat but thoroughly humbled Garry Kasparov, the world champion at the time. That is because chess, while highly complex, can be reduced to a matter of brute force computation.
Go is different. Deceptively easy to learn, either for a computer or a human, it is a game of such depth and complexity that it can take years for a person to become a strong player. To date, no computer has been able to achieve a skill level beyond that of the casual player.
The game is played on a board divided into a grid of 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. Black and white pieces called stones are placed one at a time on the grid's intersections. The object is to acquire and defend territory by surrounding it with stones.
Programmers working on Go see it as more accurate than chess in reflecting the ineffable ways in which the human mind works. The challenge of programming a computer to mimic that process goes to the core of artificial intelligence, which involves the study of learning and decision-making, strategic thinking, knowledge representation, pattern recognition and, perhaps most intriguingly, intuition.
"A good Go player could make a move and other players say, `Yes, that's a good move,' but they can't explain to you why it's a good move, or how they even know it's a good move," said Dr. John McCarthy, a professor emeritus at Stanford University and a pioneer in artificial intelligence.
Dr. Danny Hillis, a computer designer and chairman of the technology company Applied Minds, said that the depth of Go made it ripe for the kind of scientific progress that comes from studying one example in great detail. "We want the equivalent of a fruit fly to study," Dr. Hillis said. "Chess was the fruit fly for studying logic. Go may be the fruit fly for studying intuition."
Along with intuition, pattern recognition is a large part of the game. While computers are good at crunching numbers, people are naturally good at matching patterns. Humans can recognize an acquaintance at a glance, even from the back. "Every Go book is filled with advice on patterns of different kinds," Dr. McCarthy said.
Dr. Daniel Bump, a mathematics professor at Stanford, works on a program called GNU Go in his spare time. "You can very quickly look at a chess game and see if there's some major issue," he said. But to make a decision in Go, he said, players must learn to combine their pattern-matching abilities with the logic and knowledge they have accrued in years of playing.
"If you watch really strong players," Dr. Bump said, "some seem to make fairly mundane moves, but at the end of the game they're ahead. Others do spectacular things."
One measure of the challenge the game poses is the performance of Go computer programs. The last five years have yielded incremental improvements but no breakthroughs, said David Fotland, a programmer and chip designer in San Jose, Calif., who created and sells The Many Faces of Go, one of the few commercial Go programs.
Mr. Fotland's program was the winner of a tournament last weekend in Edmonton, Alberta, that pitted 14 Go-playing programs -- including several from Japan -- against one another. But even The Many Faces of Go is weak enough that most strong players could beat it handily.
Part of the challenge has to do with processing speed. The typical chess program can evaluate about 300,000 positions per second, and Deep Blue was able to evaluate some 200 million positions per second. By midgame, most Go programs can evaluate only a couple of dozen positions each second, said Anders Kierulf, who wrote a program called SmartGo.
In the course of a chess game, a player has an average of 25 to 35 moves available. In Go, on the other hand, a player can choose from an average of 240 moves. A Go-playing computer would take about 30,000 years to look as far ahead as Deep Blue can with chess in three seconds, said Michael Reiss, a computer scientist in London.
If processing power were all there was to it, the solution would be simply a matter of time, since computers are growing ever faster. But the obstacles go much deeper. Not only do Go programs have trouble evaluating positions quickly, they have trouble evaluating them correctly.
Nonetheless, the allure of computer Go increases as the difficulties it poses encourage programmers to advance basic work in artificial intelligence. Graduate students produce dissertations on the topic, and a handful of researchers around the world devote much or all of their attention to it.
The game attracts people from all fields. For example, Chen Zhixing, a retired chemistry professor in Guangzhou, China, wrote a program called Handtalk, which dominated the computer Go field for several years. Dr. Bump, 50, whose field is number theory, has been playing Go for 35 years and taught himself the C programming language four years ago so he could write Go software. Mr. Fotland, 44, the creator of The Many Faces of Go has been working on computer Go for 20 years and is chief technology officer at Ubicom, a small semiconductor company in Silicon Valley.
All are very strong Go players, and it takes a strong Go player to write even a weak Go program. Mr. Fotland, for instance, said he had written programs for checkers, Othello and chess. The algorithms are all very similar, and it is not difficult to write a reasonably strong program, he said. Each of the games took him a year or two to finish. "But when I started on Go," he said, "there was no end to it."
Mr. Fotland said that his Go programming was especially weak when he was a beginning player. "A lot of the stuff I wrote was just plain wrong because I didn't understand the game well enough," he said.
Even when skill develops, however, translating it into a program is not an obvious task. "There's a certain stream of consciousness when you're looking at positions," Dr. Bump said. "You might look at 10 variations, but you don't really know what's going on in the back of your mind. Even a strong player doesn't know how his mind works when he looks at a position."
"We think we have the basics of what we do as humans down pat," Dr. Bump said. "We get up in the morning and make breakfast, but if you tried to program a computer to do that, you'd quickly find that what's simple to you is incredibly difficult for a computer."
The same is true for Go. "When you're deciding what variations to consider, your subconscious mind is pruning," he said. "It's hard to say how much is going on in your mind to accomplish this pruning, but in a position on the board where I'd look at 10 variations, the computer has to look at thousands, maybe a million positions to come to the same conclusions, or to wrong conclusions."
Dr. Reiss, who is the author of Go4++, a previous champion that placed second in last weekend's playoff, agrees with Dr. Bump. Dr. Reiss, who is an expert in neural networks, compares a human being's ability to recognize a strong or weak position in Go with the ability to distinguish between an image of a chair and one of a bicycle. Both tasks, he said, are hugely difficult for a computer.
For that reason, Mr. Fotland said, "writing a strong Go program will teach us more about making computers think like people than writing a strong chess program."
Dr. Reiss, who works on Go full time, said he would not think of devoting his time to any other problem. "It's a fundamentally interesting problem, but also it's just the right level of difficulty," he said. "If it was too easy it would have been solved already. If it was fantastically difficult, people might give up in frustration."
"I think in the long run the only way to write a strong Go program is to have it learn from its own mistakes, which is classic A.I., and no one knows how to do that yet," Mr. Fotland said. A few programs have some learning capabilities built into them.
Mr. Fotland's program, for instance, refers to a database of games played by strong players in deciding its moves, and Dr. Reiss's program employs a learning scheme for deciding which moves are interesting to look at.
Dr. Reiss said he had come up with an idea for a new Go program that would learn by analyzing professional games. But to pursue his idea would require too much work, he said, depriving him of time to continue making updates to his current program.
It seems unlikely that a computer will be programmed to drub a strong human player any time soon, Dr. Reiss said. "But it's possible to make an interesting amount of progress, and the problem stays interesting," he said. "I imagine it will be a juicy problem that people talk about for many decades to come."
then its easy to conclude that you aree either American or jewish/israeli.
Most of the civilized world views Israel as thee biggest terrorist in the middle east. Its only brainwashed americans who continue to support Jewish Bullshit in the mid-east.
Or maybe more of a "why would you want to":
Chessbase has several chess programs for sale on their website. While quite inexpensive (~$45-$80 USD) they are advertised as being damn near impossible to beat. In fact, Chessbase's front page highlights one of the programs for sale kicking the ass of the entire Swiss Chess Team!
So why would you want to actually buy one of these programs? They aren't teaching programs. They aren't for a friendly game against the computer. They aren't open sourced (that I could see) so you can't study the algorithms. They are meant to destroy every human they come in contact with.
Does anyone outside of chess grand masters use these things? (How many grand masters are there, anyway?) I'm a very mediocre chess player myself, and if I want my ass handed to me in chess I'll go down to the local high school club and call them all smelly virgins before starting a game. At least I'll have some face-to-face interaction.
So what's the point?
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
You nailed it pad're. It's a grift. Even tho chess IS a game between two human players (only), the chess_like fraud you describe is just pathetic. As experienced chess players (of all strengths) know, the game is geometrically lawful rather than rule based and a naked computer will ALWAYS lose to a reasonably strong, creative human player. AI_Lusrs foam-at-the-mouth admitting this by queering the machine with a dozen GM strength experts on a particular opponents style.
I'm just waiting for the day when chess has been solved, and it's proven that black always draws, except for 1) e4 ... being a forced loss for white.
:)
Check out suicide chess (fics rules) for a handful of forced losses for white at move 1.
Well, here's a heads up. That is exactly how human players prepare for matches against each other. They sit down and play through their opponents previous matches, and try to find weaknesses and holes to use against them.
Yeah - they ahve a big catalogue of games to go through when playing human opponents. But they don't have this when playing the computers, so they are at a distinct disadvantage.
Does anyone know if the computers have a 'style', i.e. that a grandmaster might be able to predict what they would do accurately in any given situation?
Star Trek != AI. All chess programs do for the most part is a min-max search to try and place themselves in the most likely position to win. Playing not to win, but to tie, would then mean that the search would not pick the best move which would thus mean that the probability of it losing becomes much higher.
Chess is gay, linux sucks, IBM makes inferorir hardware, slashdot is going down, trolls rule, moderators get fucked up the ass every time they moderate posts to -1
I bet Deep Blue couldn't take him!
McK
Computers definately have a 'style'. Most expert players can tell the difference between playing a human and a computer. It's an ancient method to win against a computer by setting up easy sacrifices. A weaker program will accept every pawn you give it, while your positions gets stronger with fewer pieces. Stronger programs tend to be more difficult to beat this way, but you can still do it when you have get to 'know' the program.
And that's what made the difference in Kasparov vs. Deep Blue. Deep Blue was specifically programmed to beat Kasparov, while Kasparov had nothing to base HIS calculations on before the games. So he was at an disadvantage. There were other disadvantages for him at that game too, IIRC it had something to do with time limits and how Deep Blue made its moves. My guess is that he accepted these because of arrogance. He didn't anticipate how well the computer would play against him.
Anyways, computers are very near to becoming world champions in longer games. They already are by a great margin in shorter ones.
One game is just not enough to declare a new champion. If Kasparov had the chance to play the program before the game, he definately would have won. Alas, then I think the computer could be said to be at a disadvantage. Especially if he was allowed to review the code beforehand. Then the game really becomes a hunt for bugs and weaknesses in the sourcecode, rather than actual play.
So the game between humans and computers will never be even. The only interesting thing about the whole thing is that a computer actually beat the world champion. However, what does that mean? Already, computers excel in calculating rather than humans, and the mastery of computers in chess has really nothing to do with intelligence, as most people thought it would 30-40 years ago.
In other words: The whole interest about chessmachines beating humans has become irrelevant and inevitable. The almost-brute force algorithms works and the machines becomes faster and faster. While the original idea behind the interest belongs to the past.
This threat to the supremacy of mankind will soon be quelled when we uncover the talented chess-playing midget secretly hidden inside Deep Fritz's supposed workings.
in any event- im reminded of the checkers champion computer players... they always win. the real question is- how do they win? the answer is: by storing a set number of move in lookup tables. in other words- once a game gets to a certain point, the computer opponent looks up, in a database, a winning set of moves from the given point in the game. how is this ai? how is this 'machine bettering man' on a level playing field? the answer is that it isn't.
programming a computer to play until it reaches a point where the number of moves left in the game are finite, and the computer has a database of moves that guarantee wins from this position is not artificial intelligence- it's loading the deck.
if you really want to impress people, build a machine that has no idea what the rules are, but rather is taught the rules as it plays the game. if that machine can beat the best players in the world, then we have an argument for a machine intelligence that is both strategic and insightful.
until that point, we have nothing but technical deception; technical deception in the same sense that Eliza was programmed as an 'ai'. what it appears to be on the surface is not, in fact, what it actually is.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
It's possible to say that Kasparov have a strong computational resources at his home so he have not only prepared well against the hardware competitors (does he had such an oppurtunity with DeepBlue?) but the devolopers have close ties with Kasparov by ownself.
(Don't think that DF/DJ have a 'kasparov backdoor' :)
July 23, 2002
I just love all the people of this world who have opinions on things but never actually are willing to stick anything behind them.
Let me clarify some of the following: Interview and the wonders of Slashdot and the ability to look beyond the tips of their noses when reading anything on slashdot - most of the comments there are made before anyone has actually READ anything.
Anyway - for the few level headed enough to 1. actually have contributed ever to linux or any part of it and not just spouted out words but not had the guts to back them with code and effort, or 2. actually see more than their little world and are willing to actually understand "the enemy" so to speak, they might actually see where I'm coming from.
The desktop market share windows has isn't going away. It's entrenched. Everyone I speak to who devout isn't a linux head says "yeah - heard of linux - I know it's meant to be stable, but I can't use my apps on it". It's not a matter of if they will be happy with openoffice, or be happy with whatever equivalent there is - they want THAT PARTICULAR APP.
Also not to mention the ease of use windows has. You plug in a new usb device, or a new card or anything. It detects it - find the driver or asks you for the disk you got in the box, and bingo. On linux? HA! Good luck. Half the time I need to do endless reserach first to see if its supported - and even if it is, half the time I have to do some obscure hunting for code I need to compile and specially configure that more often than not only paertially supports it - and even then with moe bugs than you can poke a stick at. The average person doesn't want to do this - and rightly, shouldn't. I won't stop using linux. I still use it as my desktop. I know many others do. But linux isn't goin to beat microsoft. It isnt' going to take the majority share of the desktop markent. I never said it was dead. I said Linux has lost. It's not going to win. Just because you lose does not mean you re dead, but don't expect the masses of cheering fans. It's going to remain the minority holder on the desktop. In that respect I see it as a loss.
Also I haven't stopped working on stuff. I haven't stopped on E. I'm not bitter or have sour grapes. Just because someone asks me for facts and i give them without flowery words or soothing tones does not mean I'm bitter and am trying to extract my pound of flesh. I never really dodge the trusth or facts, and if people don't seem to be able to read something at face value - well that's their problem. Did I not say KDE and GNOME were doing a good job? Did I ever start Enlightenment with the aim to become an easy to use desktop for the masses? I never did. I never claimed such. Anyone who says so is putting words in my mouth. E was always a toy project. It is my toy. I get to push boundaires and explore ideas using it. It only ever made it open source for anyone elses desktop other than mine because people pestered me after seeing screenshots.
Also people just didn't get my point. I'm saying the future Isn't a desktop at all - the encumbent (windows) on the desktop will stay, but the future isn't a desktop computer at all - it isn't a nasty mess of a desktop with taskbar and a screen and a mouse and keyboard. I'm not the first to say this by any means - and I won't be the last. Devices (such as pda's and the likes) now have the grunt that desktops had years ago. They are what I see as the future. Devices you use for a limited set of things that fit in your pocket, have no wires and always work. Have a look at the i-mode and ketai phenomenon in Japan. Most people just want to do things - they don't care how - be it via windows or linux. Whichever way works. The techies like us care how - but what I'm saying is we are the minority. The mass market where linux can be on everyone's desk is not via the PC desktop - you want linux everywhere? Put it on their phones, in their cars, on their trains, on their watches. That's how you will get that.
I will continue to use Linux on my desktops because I like it. I will continue to develop for X because I like it. I will continue to use Linux on my laptop because I like it. I will do it because "I can" and because "I want to". But I will not go thinking that linux will take over the worlds desktop computers. There was a day years ago it might have had a fighting chance - if applications had started to be developed that people wanted, but that time has passed and all the apps are for the reigning OS and will stay that way mostly. The desktop isn't going to be a big thing for linux, but it has a fair go in other arenas.
So those of you who thought I'd given up - no way. I've just switched game plan. I never was a Linux visionary - never wanted to be, never asked to be - people just seem to have said I am. I am going to leave being a visionary and political activist to others. I say things how I see them. Take everything I say with a grain of salt - invariably it's me trying to make a point. I'm a realist and I'm into the practical of things. If I'm going to fight I want to make sure I have a damn good chance at winning.
Logically thinking this match has no purpose. If Kasparov wins, well - we can always say that chess computer is just a bunch of chips still far away from AI. Otherwise, If a computer will prevail - hmm .. Again we can always say that brute power of move iteration and a huge library of stored matches made the trick, and of course - that computer is no way smarter than a human. Kasparov is a brave guy trying to prove meaningless things but on the other hand - moving technology forward
When Kramnik offered to play Fritz, he said "Fine, give me a copy of the program and let me play with it before hand." The creators of Fritz freaked out and everybody said "But then you'll be able to find the weaknesses and just exploit those!" Well, that's not Kramnik's fault -- if he found a human player that always made the same mistake, he'd certainly take advantage of it every time, right?
The list of fairness questions goes on and on...since a computer can memorize openings, can't a human player be allowed to have his books with him? Since a computer doesn't need rest breaks, can't they be as short as possible? Are the programmers allowed to tweak the computer between every match, every move? Why?
So what I'm wondering is, what has to happen in these matches in order for both sides to consider them fair fights?
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
In the modern version of the turing test, ie IRCbots, most people are very easy to fool when they are not expecting it. However, fooling a discering judge who is trying to tell human thought from canned waffle is still impossibly hard, in the 'We still have very little idea of how to do it' category.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
This is completely on topic!
It's troll!
Doesn't ANYBODY fucking know how to moderate around here?
The Rock vs GRACE?
Didn't Kasparov beat Deep Blue but got beaten by DeepER Blue?
I once read in a book by Harry Anderson that there was a trick you can to challenge all the members of a chess club at once. It works easy for an even number of games, and there is a trick for an odd number.
1st have the players ranked by ability and start with the strongest players. let them open. halfway through you open using the moves from the first half of number of games. then use the moves from the second half to play the first half. if you bet you can win half of the games, you'll win.
if you connect the two computers so that secretly gary is actually playing vladimir, it would be interesting. though not very nice and certinaly not verry honorable if you didn't tell them
How about Deep Fritz vs Deep Junior?
Deep(er) Blue used some special-purpose hardware, but Deep Fritz and Deep Junior don't. Multiprocessors are a commodity nowadays.
Deep(er) Blue's custom ASICs were basically there to make the brute-force approach go faster. They didn't implement some sort of expert system or neural net, they had little to do with sophisticated position evaluation, they were mostly just there to speed up the nuts-and-bolts operations of walking extremely large decision trees.
The scorn you heap upon this post's grandparent seems just a trifle misplaced, since you yourself seem to know little about the programs being discussed. They're a combination of chess-specific knowledge and fast implementations of fairly ancient algorithms, so they're pretty formidable opponents, but in terms of AI research they've progressed little beyond an early-to-mid-80s level. Nobody that I know who actually works in AI would say any different, either.
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Archon was released by Electronic Arts and I loved playing it on the Commodore 64.
Here's a site with a review and screen shots.
Can't we just abandon the whole notion that getting computers to play any single game has anything to do with understanding intelligence. It's all just a parlour trick. Fun to watch, and interesting hobby, but it doesn't really provide any real insights into intelligence.
Now, maybe if you could create a program that could learn any game you put in front of it and get better at those games on it's own, you might have something.
...and that is precisely the opportunity that was denied Kasparov. Deeper Blue and its handlers -especially Joel Benjamin - had years to dissect Kasparov's games, but Kasparov had no access to DB's oeuvre. That's not a level playing field.
Another aspect you've overlooked is that human preparation to play a particular opponent is usually on the order of weeks or months, and does not significantly sacrifice the preparer's ability to play other opponents. Even in the middle of preparing to play Kramnik or Anand, Kasparov could go to a tournament and beat just about anyone else. By contrast, DB was in preparation for years and the result was so finely tuned toward playing Kasparov that DB would have fared very poorly in any top-level tournament involving anyone other than Kasparov. That kind of inflexibility is not a hallmark of a intelligence, artificial of otherwise. What it indicates is that the basic methods were so old and so well understood that people have been able to spend years just tuning the implementation.
Making a computer beat the world champion is a respectable feat. However, it's not even the highest goal in computer chess. Making a computer that could beat a series of opponents, without fundamental changes equivalent to a brain transplant between matches, would be more impressive. Making a computer that could win a 16-player round robin tournament against a whole field of top grandmasters - something Kasparov still does regularly, to this day - would be more impressive still. Making a computer that could play speed chess better than Anand or Hawkeye would be another worthwhile challenge in a different direction. Then there's Go, and then a bunch of other challenges, and then there's the real world. Spending years to create a program that can beat one player in one chess match under less-than-fair conditions is really a pretty low goal.
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I think they should have these computers actually enter competitions, and play like anyone else has to in order to go for the title. Then if the computer wins, it has truely one.
Programming is simply the application of logic to creativity
I agree with most of your post, but I also think you overstate the case if you say that human players prepare to play versus a particular opponent in exactly the same manner that a computer program does. There are some similarities at a superficial level, but profound differences in how information is processed and in how changes are made to that information processing. (Human beings do not train to play a specific opponent by reprogramming their brains via neurosurgery.)
This concept is trivially obvious to most of the slashdot crowd, but many less computer-savvy people do not fundamentally understand how a computer program "plays" chess. It is easy for those people to read a statement such as "That is exactly how human players prepare for matches against each other," and mistakenly think that computing systems like Deep Blue process information in much the same way that humans do.
Before the match, the system is Kasparov + database-laptop + additional grandmasters + computers. But during the match it's just Kasparov with no auxiliary support.
Kasparov himself has developed a new format for chess playing, Advanced Chess. In Advanced Chess, each human player can bring a computer right into the tournament with them.
How about creating a GUI at distributed.net, such that anyone, anywhere, anytime, can play chess against a virtual supercomputer.
I know I'd run it on my share of boxes!
all checkers games have been played and Samuals found that the first player to move always loses.
chess may take a decade or more to get to that point.
Deep Blue, Deep Fritz, Deep Junior, Deep Thought. When are we going to get Deep Frink, so I can find out who's going to win the Superbowl?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
You are correct when you observe that Kasparov was denied the opportunity to prepare for Deep Blue, and therefore that Deep Blue's win is somewhat diminished.
However, I think it's fair for Deep Blue's handlers to tune Deep Blue for Kasparov or any other opponent. If Deep Blue were to play in a tournament, it would make sense for the handlers to prepare it for each opponent, and then to set up its style of play for any particular game based on the opponent in that game. Human grandmasters do as much. They take their opponent into consideration, including recently played games, when they decide how to play a specific game in a tournament.
I agree completely with your observation that creating a computer program that could win a prestigious international round robin tournament would be a much more impressive achievenment. However, adjusting the style of play for each opponent would be fair game.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
If the computer's preparation were comparable in duration and resources to the human's preparation, that would be fine. My point, though, is that in the particular case of Deeper Blue vs. Kasparov that was not the case. The computer had much more time to prepare for Kasparov than vice versa (he was kinda busy winning tournaments and such). Similarly, DB had many more of Kasparov's games to study than vice versa. It's not a problem that DB was allowed to prepare; it's a problem that Kasparov effectively was not.
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We had quite a lively discussion about go on slashdot a while ago.
Pfft... ever been to fuckingmachines.com?
We never stood a chance!
Recently, I programmed a tic-tac-toe game (noughts and crosses for the other people) and did not teach it any rules. All it knew was a history of games already played. The gist of it was as follows. It looked at a previous game and if the moves matched what was on the board already, then it tried to play the same way that the winner of that game played.
I thrashed it for about 50 games and then it steadily started pushing me to a draw in almost every game. Around 120 games it started beating me on the odd occasion. If you are a Delphi programmer, I will send you the source code if you are interested.
The IBM Deep Blue supercomputer that defeated World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in the 1997 historic match had 480 custom chess chips in the system. Each of these chess chips contains one of the most sophisticated chess evaluation functions ever designed, whether in hardware or in software.
Well, I already agreed that Kasparov was put a significant disadvantage. In fact, I'm pretty sure that he had NO opportunity to study the computer's past games, because it had been significantly revised and the IBM team deliberately refused to give him any sample games. All in all, I'd like to see a computer participate in a strong round robin tournament as you suggested. I also think that it's only a matter of time, because the advances in speed and such will just overwhelm us poor humans. Of course, all that it really demonstrates is that machines can crunch through enormous numbers of possibilities and handle certain computations better than humans can. For example, if a strong machine makes it to a five piece or less endgame, it will play the remainder of the game flawlessly, and it does so with no real intelligence.
For what it's worth, mathematicians have had to put up with the "tyranny of the machine" with the acceptance of a computerized exhaustive search that confirms the proof of the (formerly) famous "four color theorem." But what can you do?
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
Very interesting
That says a lot about his memory power. I think grand masters do have a lot more brute calculating power than normal people, not to say that they don't use knowledge and creativity. However a guy that can remeber 56 boards can clearly see further ahead than most people.
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Actually, go is a very popular game world wide, arguably more popular than chess. It's true that the areas in which go is popular aren't the most affluent in the world, but there are a great deal of programmers working on go. A very wealthy Tawainese man, the late Mr. Ing set up a foundation to award $40 million (TWD) to the first go program to beat a 1-dan player. He also set up incremental prizes for each kyu level a computer could advance to. Literally thousands of programs have competed, and none can win against a one dan amateur, even with a 9 stone handicap.
Go is very unlike chess. Chess computers improve greatly with improvements in hardware. In fact, very straight forward chess programs with simple evaluation algorithms and minimal pruning can defeat master level chess players when run on modern PCs. One example is the ever popular TSCP . Go programs on the other hand do not improve notably simply by using a brute force approach. Handtalk, the former computer go champion plays less than one kyu better on an Athlon2000 than it does on a 386. For more info, check the links on Mick's Computer Go Page
I'm a gnu world man.
IBM cheated. They were changing the program in between games to "adapt" to Kasparov. It's about as blatant as telling it what moves to make. And he caught them at it. At one point Kasparov was confused by an unexpected move the computer made and accused them of just what happened. IBM denied it at first but later admitted having "adusted" the program the night before. This was specifically in violation of the rules agreed upon for that tournament.
That is exactly how human players prepare for matches against each other.
False, players also need to talk, walk, remember other things, and a bunch of other non-specialized activities. They need to be humans. On the other hand, a computer is "anything, but not a human". Why? Because there is NO limit to how much memory they can use, how much processing power they might use. Perfect memory, perfect calculus.
So if you could build a infinite memory/ infinit processing power computer, you could just precalculate all the possible outcomes of matches. Say a ply of 60 or more.
That computer is smart?
Vision 1: To call a computer chess program "inteligent" you need to draw a line and state: "this memory and this CPU should give you enough resources to beat any human". Anything else is just plain unfair and it's no longer inteligent.
Vision 2: A chess program should be an entityand not a bunch tuned of knowledge / rules / algoritms. It should be able to learn from experience without human intervention (ie: no specialized learning program, this one should be tuned by the computer itself), it should be able to plan it's own strategy, and autotrain itself. Ie: you teach them the chess rules, let it comunicate (gather more data, a database if requested, etc) and then the computer must do everything without interference.
Level 1 is acceptable, but we'd like to see a computer beat a human under the much more fair Vision 2.
unfinished: (adj.)
1. "Brute-force" as a discription of what "they" have achieved with Deep Blue, etc, is a very poor characterisation, usually used by critics of the effort. Expert system (even expert position analyses hardware for Deep Blue) is a much better name.
2. We are still at the beginning stages of understanding how to do this (witness the junior state of "Go" programs) and my point about fundamental research seems to hold up well.
Wouldn't faster computers only mean faster "thinking", not better? I guess that's why they have clocks at tournaments.
To be honest I still lose against GNU chess if it plays with the opening book. But it opened my eyes to use my knights better.
see this web page : AMATEUR vs WORLD CHESS CHAMPION COMPUTER JUNIOR 7/ ADVANCED CHESS Spectacular challenge in october 2002, a chess amateur play a world chess champion computer in advanced chess. For more information, please see official webpage (english and french) : http://www.chesslines.com/indexmatchen.html Greetings Stephan Glickmann Press contact
... because it sure seems like he should know what he's talking about. Thanks for patrolling the chess discussions, Gian-Carlo; you are now my friend.]